Still have a few Tomicas left after the Piranha feeding frenzy. Check out all our latest inventory on ebay. CLICK HERE.

I have a big place in my heart for these Japanese gems, and I’ll tell you why.

When I was a young grommet, there was no daycare or fancy preschooling for me. My older brother was in school and my dad worked all day. I spent those awkward post-toddler, pre-Kindergarten days primarily with my mom, who seemed to drag me along on marathon outings to the fabric store at least four times per week. She must have spent six hundred thousand dollars at the fabric store. Or, I’m just now realizing, she may have actually worked there full time. Anyway, these grueling excursions laid the groundwork for my later interest in painful endurance sports.
During those rare moments when we weren’t at the fabric store, I was corralled in or around the house to keep me safe from the omnipresent molesters in vans and left to entertain myself while Mom did things like look into the distance wistfully over her macrame project, and Joan Baez records spun thirty three and a third times per minute on our dusty cinder block-and-board shelf wall. Fountain of sorrow, fountain of light… That’s how I remember it. Not sure how accurate that is. It was the 70s, and I was right in the thick of it.

My attention was often focused on the ground or floor in front of me, where some sort of minor make-believe drama was working itself out. Sirens! Action! A young lady named Lisa with a ponytail who is in need of rescue! I had a vivid imagination, to put it mildly. Fancied myself quite the little rescuer and watched plenty of bad 1970s rescue TV to stoke the fires: SWAT, Emergency!, Chopper One. Sirens all day long. Always with my modest collection of toy cars, which included a handful of Redline Hot Wheels and at least one Tomica.

Even then, five-year-old Bobby could easily see a big difference between the Hot Wheels and the Tomica, and there was no question which I liked better. The Hot Wheels were cool, but over-the-top flashy. With their fat wheels and engines popping out of hoods they didn’t look like real cars to me. The Tomica was much more realistic, which made my little rescue dramas work. I didn’t know what a “Cedric” was, or where Japan was, but I knew that I loved the real low-key look and feel of that Nissan Cedric Fire Wagon with its opening hatch. And the way it rolled, so smooth, and with suspension. Obviously better. I still remember loving it.

It sounds crazy, but that little red car gave me some kind of hope for a world that was often Fountain-of-Sorrow, Send-in-the-Clowns rust-colored bleak. What a great little machine! What a serious toy! They didn’t have to make it so great, but they did. Maybe the future would be kind of like this toy car? Thoughtfully engineered just to bring joy to children and the young at heart? Better than it has to be? It wasn’t just playing with the thing that made me happy — its existence made me happy.

Last year my mom brought me a box that held, among other forgotten treasures, my old Tomica Fire Wagon. How it survived all those decades without getting tossed is a miracle—or evidence of a mother’s love and understanding. When I opened the box and saw it, a rush of weird forgotten emotions flooded my systems. I almost fell over, for real.

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It’s cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all

The car was almost totally bare of paint. Its lights, siren and hatch were missing, or rather, torn right off. I spent so much of my early childhood hunched over that thing. In my head, it was always bright red, shiny and new, just like the one in the photo above.

Of course, it remains my all-time favorite toy, if not my favorite material object, and the most valuable diecast car that I own. I would carry it around all the time except then I would lose it, it would roll silently out of my pocket at the DMV, still so smooth on its suspended wheels, and I would no doubt experience such a disconcertingly high level of emotional devastation that it would make me question my whole deal. Keeping the thing tucked away for now.

Seeing my old beloved Cedric after 40-plus years started me on this admittedly strange if not outright worrisome vintage diecast jag. It gave me the sudden and very strong urge to accumulate massive piles of 1960s Matchbox and 1970s Tomicas—the more realistic toy cars—just so I could hold them and look at them up close. I don’t pretend to understand it. A simple urge to regress?

Of course you have to realize that the POTUS campaign was ongoing at the time, and things were going south in a big hurry. It’s natural to want to escape such a reality, at least for part of the time, and the more ridiculous the escape the better. You think you’re getting ridiculous, America? I’ll show you ridiculous. I’LL TEACH YOU!! Come to think of it, I might have been looking closely at tiny cars for that same sense of promise in the future that I felt when I was a little kid.

Long story short, I love Tomica mini cars and you will too. They remind me of good things about my childhood and about the world. And if I don’t sell all of those that I currently possess, it will be all right with me.

UPDATE: Sold every last one. But good news! We got a lot more of ’em and they’re for sale on our ebay page CLICK HERE.